There but for the grace of Joe Jackson, go I
Why do I care about Michael Jackson?
I mean it.
I never liked his music, never understood why anyone did--I knew people with life-sized posters of him and I just thought, wow. Now there's a guy with weird hair in ugly clothes. And he sings like a squawky girl.
There was a rumor he was getting his voicebox changed. There was a rumor he was dating a monkey. He was having plastic surgery.
I was busy wandering away from the gaggles of girls giggling and sighing over him, so I could attend to more important things. Like picking daisies and chasing rabbits.
When did I stop daisy-picking and rabbit-chasing? Was it somewhere around ninth grade when people started telling me outright that "such things" were not befitting of a young lady? And things like giggling about teen idols befitted?
And people wonder why I have such a problem with gender roles.
That's just it, though. Much of the time I click neatly into a Midwestern woman's mold, that is, the woman I was brought up to be, that is, a woman who has immense pride in her home and keeps it as such. Not because I'm afraid to claw my way out of the mold. Not because I worry that my mother will disapprove.
I'm much more afraid of my grandmother.
No, no, I kid. I am as I am because I like being this way, because a long time ago I realized that if I was always worrying about what others thought, I wasn't worrying about what I thought. I don't keep house the way my mother would like me to. I don't do anything the way anyone but me would like me to.
But sometimes I confuse, even worry, myself. 75 channels and all I can find to watch is VH1's treatment of Michael Jackson's childhood? Maybe it's because some of it overlaps with my own childhood, barely remembered as it is. I think back to before I was ten years old and everything's a colorful blur. It was how I perceived the world. And I feel like I missed a lot.
Visually. And I ignored a lot of what I heard because I didn't have visual cues to place it with. I couldn't interpret most of what was happening around me, so I closed myself off.
Yes, yes, I was complicated, complex. Still am. Etc. But one purpose was served...if I was a child genius, no one knew about it. And VH1 isn't documenting my life.
Thank God.